


Canines

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Vampire AU, Werewolf AU, Werewolf!Caitlin, vampire!Cisco
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22369072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: Before the vampires came, Caitlin was married and happy and in love. But the vampires did come, and everything changed.Now she's become a werewolf, battling the vampires with every breath she takes. Until the night she encounters Cisco in the park. The man she loved. The man she married. The vampire who tried to kill her.
Relationships: Cisco Ramon/Caitlin Snow
Kudos: 22





	Canines

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an anonymous prompt on Tumblr: “I still remember the way you taste.” 
> 
> Blame Hedgi for this, because I always blame her for angst, and also KillerFrost from the Discord chat and her art.

Clouds drifted across the half moon, dappling the park with patches of gloom. Caitlin didn’t mind. She had good night vision, and she had other senses, too.

She could remember long ago, when she’d been human. She’d walked through this park in the sunlight, holding hands with the man she loved. 

But that had been before the first vampires arrived two years ago, and the werewolves followed, bringing their war to Central City. Her home belonged to the monsters now, and she was one of them.

She set off around the perimeter of the park in a lope. It didn’t belong to either side. They’d settled into an uneasy truce a few months before, with the park a kind of no-monsters’ land. Supposedly, vampires and werewolves alike had safe passage. She snorted to herself.

She hadn’t trusted a vampire since the day her husband had tried to kill her.

If she let herself, she could still remember the feeling of returning to find him in their living room, safe and sound after a week of being missing. She’d cried out, “Cisco!” and run to wrap him in her arms. 

Only for him to open his mouth - that mouth she’d kissed and smiled at and loved - to reveal razor-sharp fangs as he lunged for her throat.

She didn’t let herself remember very often.

She paid attention to the scents that washed over her as she ran, seeking out anything that might be a clue. Members of the pack had been disappearing in this area. Young werewolves, barely turned, still learning their own power. It made her skin itch, made her want to howl at the moon overhead. The pack was all she had anymore.

More practically, their truce with the vampires was still so tenuous that if they kept losing young, strong wolves, the balance of power could tip away from them in a moment. 

She paused in a stand of trees, lifting her muzzle into the wind. A whiff of a familiar and hated scent froze her where she stood. Old, dead blood.

Her lips lifted over her teeth as an instinctive growl rumbled in her throat.

_Vampire._

She pressed herself low to the ground, clamping her jaws shut. Suckers had excellent hearing. She picked her delicate way through the bushes, which had grown out from their manicured shapes into tangling hedges now that there was nobody who cared to maintain them. 

She found a spot still open enough to poke her muzzle through, and sniffed deeply, trying to work out if she’d encountered this sucker before.

No … at least, she thought not.

But there was something familiar about the scent. She couldn’t put a name to it. Maybe one she’d tangled with briefly. As if they’d swiped and snarled at each other, retreating without drawing blood. 

She squirmed further under the hedge until she could see his shape. Some of the older wolves said dependency on sight was a human weakness. Your nose should tell you all.

But she’d only been a wolf for a year. Since … 

She cut that thought off. He was gone. As good as dead.

A cloud drifted away from the moon, bathing the clearing in silvery light, sending an involuntary shiver down her spine. Leaves rustled.

The sucker lifted his head, and she went still. Her pale pelt was a liability, standing out in the darkness, but as long as she stayed low and hidden and _still_ -

After a moment, he crouched over his project again. She bit back another growl. What was he doing? Setting a trap? One of the pack had lost a leg to a trap laid on the main street the other day. Werewolves healed fast, but that was a permanent loss.

If this sucker was setting a trap in truce space, maybe the vampires were making ready to restart the war.

And his _smell …_

Moving carefully, she crept closer, low and slow, trying to understand why his scent drew her so powerfully. 

She was getting too close, she thought, but she couldn’t stop. What was it about him?

Anyway, his head was down, his shoulders relaxed. He wasn’t paying attention. She inched closer - closer - 

Ten feet away from him, a dry leaf gave the faintest of crackles under her front paw. Faster than a blink, he whipped around and sprayed something directly in her face.

With a yelp, she twisted away. Whatever-it-was burned in her throat and her lungs, spreading through her body -

Then a heavy weight slammed her back against the grass. She snarled and tried to bite, tried to swipe with her claws, but her attacker evaded easily.

Moonlgiht glinted off fangs, and she thought, _I refuse to die like this, brought down by a fucking_ sucker - 

Then the weight was gone. 

She lifted her head, blinking at the night, which was suddenly both dimmer and sharper than it had been. She rolled to her belly and pushed herself up on her front legs -

Except they weren’t her front legs, they were her arms. She was in her human form. Horror spilled through her.

She was the only one who controlled her form. _Her._ Hard-won control, but hers and hers alone. The moon couldn’t turn her or keep her from turning back, not anymore. 

What had that sucker done?

She whipped her head around, teeth bared, and found the sucker crouched a few feet away, shrouded in darkness. She tried to shift to her wolf form, and failed again. Even with the light of the moon pouring down on her, she stayed in her human form.

“Are you okay?”

The voice.

_That voice._

“Cisco,” she said, and hated the way her own voice shook.

The urge to bolt almost overwhelmed her, but she dug her paws - no, fingers, she had fingers - into the grass to stop herself. If she ran, he would be after her. That was what suckers did. And on two legs, in human form, she wasn’t near fast enough to escape, and she didn’t have the teeth or claws to fight. Her only weapon was her werewolf blood, poisonous to vampires. 

Small consolation, given that her throat would already be torn out by the time it took effect.

“Are you okay?” he said again.

There was a stick nearby, one that had been broken off a tree. She could smell the raw green wood, and groped for it. If she didn’t have her teeth, any weapon would do. “What did you do? What was that?”

“Wolfsbane,” he said.

_“What?”_

Panic rattled her bones for a split second before her cool, practical doctor’s mind cut in. If he’d hit her with pure extract of wolfsbane, she’d already be dead. He could be lying, but her throat still burned and her skin still prickled. And there was the way she couldn’t turn.

“Super mild,” he said. “A couple of parts per million, with a few other things thrown in. Practically homeopathy.” He eyed her. “Apparently it still works.” He shifted forward, reaching out to touch her face.

She smacked his hand aside with the stick. “Don’t try that glamour thing on me.”

“I’m not dumb enough to try and glamour a werewolf. I’m checking to see if you’re okay.”

She bared her teeth and jabbed the stick at him. He lurched backward.

“Okay,” he said tightly. “You’re fine. I get it. You mind putting down the stick? The last time you had a sharp piece of wood in your hand, you almost took my eye out.”

Instinctively, she glanced at his temple. No scar, of course. Suckers healed fast. She’d seen the skin knitting itself together before he’d escaped out the open front door. “Self defense,” she said coolly, lifting the stick higher. “You would have killed me and drunk from my cooling corpse on our living room floor.”

He shut his eyes. “Fuck.”

“Ring a bell?”

“I wasn’t trying to kill you,” he said wearily. “I was trying to turn you.”

The stick dropped involuntarily, and she gripped it tighter. “Into a vampire?”

“No, into a unicorn. Yes! Into a vampire. So we could be together.”

She sat still, letting the revelation wash over her and sink into her skin. “You just - you lunged for me. You’d been gone for days. I thought we’d find you in a morgue, if we found you at all. Then you were there, and you snarled and your _teeth -”_

He met her eyes, his full of regret. “I’m sorry. Believe me. I’m so sorry for scaring you. I wish I could have explained, but baby vamps aren’t exactly in their right minds. Getting a hold on our powers takes some wrangling. At that point, I barely knew words.”

Like werewolf cubs, she thought. She had been a little out of her mind, too, after she’d turned. Between her grief, the pull of the moon, and her overwhelming new senses, she’d been a mess.

But - 

“I didn’t want to be a vampire,” she said. “I wanted to be safe.”

“I wanted you to be safe too.”

_Like that?_ she wanted to ask. _Really? Like that?_

“Anyway,” he went on. “It didn’t matter. By the time I got my fangs on straight and went back for you for real, the mutts had already gotten to you.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “And they didn’t get to me. I went looking for them.”

He gaped at her. “You went - why? You just said you didn’t want to be a vampire, why is being a mu- werewolf any better?”

“Because as far as I could tell, the werewolves were the only ones with any defenses against vampires.” She eyed him coldly. “And at the time, that sounded like exactly what I needed.”

He shut his eyes. “Well, aren’t we just the monster Romeo and Juliet.”

“Aren’t we just,” she echoed, watching the moonlight fall on his profile.

If she hadn’t known to look for the glint of his fangs at the corners of his mouth, and the new pallor of his skin, she could have mistaken him for human. How many times had she rolled over in bed and traced her finger over the curve of his ear, the bump of his elbow, the fullness of his lower lip as he lay sleeping next to her?

From the way he met her eyes, she wondered if he was thinking similar thoughts.

His eyes moved down over her body, then up. He frowned. “You know you’re naked, right?”

“Yes,” she said tartly.

“Okay,” he said. “Just checking. Because you’re weirdly okay with it.”

She’d never been the one to stroll around their apartment naked, without so much as a bathrobe. That had been him, teasing her about her primness. “I’ve gotten used to it,” she said. “It happens every time." 

"So, wait. You’re always naked when you transform?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t, like, have a t-shirt or something?”

She waved a hand at herself. “Where exactly do you think I’d keep a t-shirt?”

“I don’t know, magic.”

She raised her brows at him. 

“Okay, fine. Point is, do you want my coat?” he asked, already lifting his hands to tug it off. “It’s freezing out here tonight.”

“Oh that’s a wonderful idea. I’ll wear something home that has the stench of vampire all over it.”

He dropped his hands. “You could’ve just said no.”

She looked away, ashamed at her own snarkiness. “I don’t think it would be smart.”

“Yeah, maybe not.”

She shot a glare at him, suddenly remembering that before all the rehashing of their history, she’d found him doing something very sneaky. “And the minute I tell them you used wolfsbane on me, we’re both going to have bigger problems.”

“I told you, it was extremely mild!”

“Mild or not,” she snapped, “by using it in this park, against me, you’ve broken the truce.”

“You wolves broke it first.”

“I have every right to be here!”

“Yeah, and so do I. But this doesn’t.” He swept out a hand to indicate the patch of ground he’d been crouching over. “Garlic.”

She stared at the patch of tall, thin green leaves. “Weeds,” she said, but their scent tickled her nose. If he hadn’t been right there, distracting her, she would have smelled it earlier. 

He rolled his eyes. “Give me a break.” He yanked his scarf over his mouth and nose, pulled on a pair of heavy gardening gloves, and reached out to yank up one of the plants, exposing the bulbous roots. “What’s that?”

She hesitated. 

“Come on. I know you know. You spent an entire summer trying to grow them on our kitchen windowsill.”

“Okay, fine, it’s garlic. Now put it down before you poison yourself.”

He tossed it away from himself, and it landed a foot or two behind Caitlin. “Yeah. Garlic. In this park, which we’ve established is a truce space.”

“Okay,” she said. “So maybe one of us planted a few cloves of garlic in an out-of-the-way area.”

He snorted.

“But can you blame us? You’ve taken six new werewolves in the past three weeks. Snatched them off the street, hid them so well even our best can’t sniff them out. What have you done with them? Tortured them? Tested your wolfsbane concoction on them?” Tears burned in her eyes and she blinked them back. 

“Bullshit we have,” he said. “That’s you, disappearing eight baby vamps before they get their teeth sharp enough.” He snarled down at the uprooted garlic bed. “You growing this so you can stuff it down their throat?”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re losing people too?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I just said.” The hard set of his face softened as he stared at her. “You don’t know anything about that, do you?”

“No,” she said, setting the stick down on the grass. “And this is the first you’ve heard of the missing cubs, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Although maybe you don’t know everything your alphas are doing.” At her look, he dropped his gaze and in a low voice admitted, “Maybe I don’t.”

They both looked at the garlic.

“How much you wanna bet you’d find a patch of wolfsbane somewhere in this park?” he said.

“Not a lot,” she said grimly. “Where did you get that spray?”

“This old book. There was a recipe.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“I don’t know, it just turned up, and I thought I’d try out some of the things it listed.” He frowned at her. “You think somebody wanted me to?”

“Anybody who’s known you for ten minutes would know you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

He grimaced. “Accurate.” He looked at the spray bottle still lying on the grass.

“The garlic, and the spray,” she continued, thinking out loud. “That could be a couple of random people, just trying to defend themselves. But kidnapping werewolves and vampires, and doing it so well that we can’t find so much as a whiff of them, that would require a lot more coordination.”

"Especially ones still getting used to their powers. I don’t know how it is for cubs, but for baby vamps, it’s a dangerous time for them and everyone around them.”

“Cubs are the same,” she said. 

“Fuck,” he mumbled.

They sat in silence under the moon for a moment or two.

“I thought the fighting was over,” he said. “It was so damn nice not to be at war for, like, a hot minute.”

“It was always only a truce,” she said. “Nobody ever said it was over.”

“Yeah, but this city’s gotten a lot better since then.”

“It really has. Why would they want to start it up again?”

“Ancestral blood feud,” he said. “You think they need more of a reason?”

She shook her head. “Something about it feels off. It’s too neat. You’re losing baby suckers - ”

“Hey.”

“Sorry. Baby vampires. At the same time, we’re losing cubs. And there’s garlic planted in a truce space, and someone made sure you found a recipe for wolfsbane spray.”

"Yeah,” he said. “That is a little too neat. You think maybe - ”

“Somebody wants us fighting,” she said.

“Yeah. Focused on each other instead of … somewhere else.”

“Who would want that? And why?”

“I don’t know. It’s an interesting question, don’t you think?”

She looked up at the moon. It was lower to the horizon. “I need to be home soon.”

He looked up too. "Yeah, sunrise in about three hours. Just enough time for me to start putting out feelers about your missing pups."

She shot him a glance that he met squarely, and looked down. She tried one more time to turn, and failed, which she’d half-expected. “How long does that wolfsbane concoction last?”

“The book said until the next moonrise.”

“Who else has it?”

“As far as I know, just me. This was the first time I’ve taken it out. I knew I was coming here and I knew somebody might not want me digging up that garlic.”

“Don’t touch it anymore,” she said. “I’ll dispose of it. And don’t tell anyone. I won’t either.”

He put his hand on her arm. It was cooler than it had been once, but the weight of it and the calluses on his palm felt oh-so-familiar. “What are you going to do?”

“The same as you,” she said. “See who knows anything about the garlic, and about the baby vamps.”

“Be careful.”

“You too.”

They both got to their feet. Caitlin wrapped her arms around herself. It was a little chilly. It didn’t matter. She knew where there was a stash of clothes in the park, usually stocked for cubs who were having trouble with their transformation. She could make it that far.

Cisco seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Uh, you want me to walk you home or something? Just in case. You know.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, reaching for the garlic lying on the ground. “I’ll have this. And a sharp stick.”

“Right,” he said. “Right.” He cast another look at the disordered patch of garlic, then turned to walk away.

She crouched to dig up the rest of the bulbs, then thought of something. “Cisco?” she called out.

He turned. “Yeah?”

“Why did you stop? Earlier. You would have bitten me.”

“Technically,” he said, “I was planning to break your neck. That whole poisonous-blood thing.” He raised his brows. “What, you thought we didn’t know?”

She swallowed. “The question stands. Why didn’t you?”

He came a step closer. “I know how you feel under me.”

She went still, the blood rising in her cheeks and thrumming low in her belly.

He smiled a little, sadly. “I still remember the way you taste. The way you smell. The way you sing really, really badly in the shower, and like weak-ass coffee.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Just because I happen to like keeping the enamel on my teeth.”

His smile quirked wider. It was an old argument. “If we meet back here in a week, the moon will be closer to full, right?”

“Waxing three-quarter, yes,” she said.

“Will you be able to turn into a human?”

“I have it under control. I’ll be fine. And I’m a werewolf,” she corrected. “Whether I look like a wolf or a woman, I’m still a werewolf.”

He sighed. “And I’m a vampire.” He turned. “See you then.”

She put a hand to her lips, wishing she could have kissed him one more time. “See you,” she whispered into the night.

FINIS


End file.
